The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is extending the availability of network computing and resources to a wide range of devices and systems that have previously been excluded from data networking environments. A goal of doing so is to enable higher levels of automation by enabling machines of various complexity and purposes to communicate without reliance on human intervention and/or patchworks of specialized interfaces. The majority of devices, sensors, and actuators (the “things”) that will be network-enabled in this manner will typically be included in much larger systems providing new forms of automation. Fog computing helps enable these larger systems by moving the computation, networking and storage capabilities of the cloud closer to the edge. Given the projected scale of such systems, the demand for fog node resources is expected to be high.
Previously available cloud solutions (e.g., computing and storage) have a number of drawbacks and limitations that preclude previously available cloud solutions from satisfying the performance demands of IoT applications. For example, previously available cloud solutions provide insufficient performance in the areas of: satisfying low latency thresholds; supporting for highly mobile endpoint devices; and providing real-time data analytics and decision making. Previously available cloud solutions are also not well suited for the type of demand generated by fixed and mobile endpoint devices densely spread across geographic areas and/or operating within heterogeneous domains. Previously available cloud solutions could also have reliability and security concerns.
Fog computing networks (hereinafter “fog networks”) are being developed as a solution to satisfy the performance demands of IoT applications. Fog networks provide computing and storage resources closer to the edge of networks, as opposed to the remote and centralized clustering of previously available cloud solutions. Endpoint client devices and near-user endpoint devices, of fog networks, are configured to collaboratively service client applications at the edge of a network—close to the things seeking resources. However, the distributed and ad hoc nature fog networks present challenges for managing competing multi-tenant applications, which are typically serviced using a pre-defined priority mechanism, such as first-in-first-out.
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